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Making Your Career Work: Profiles of Young Workers
going into the workforce. College can teach broad aspects of a field, but MSI got into the nitty-gritty of it.”
Her advice to others in her position: “Try different things out. Once you find something, you will just know when you find what’s right for you.”
EDWARD AIKEN III
Musician and Future Audio Engineer
If you search for the artist King Lavaughn on Spotify, you will find the music of a Middletown native more formally known as Edward Aiken III. Aiken, 21, left a four-year college in Illinois, where he was studying exercise science when he found it wasn’t his passion and he “didn’t think the time was worth the reward.”
Music was his interest, and he produced some songs at home while working at The Home Depot. “People found out
I was doing it, and a friend of mine who came over to record told me about this school” — SAE Institute of Technology in New York. Aiken enrolled the next day in a one-year audio engineering program. “I found something I actually wanted to do, and it took less time and less money to get me into the field of work,” he says.
“I found something I actually wanted to do, and it took less time and less money to get me into the field of work.”
Aiken had earned an associate’s degree from SUNY Westchester Community College (WCC) in film studies, but music “has been in me for a long time, probably since I was
a baby.” He took an intro audio engineering course at WCC, “and then the pandemic hit. The teacher told us to download software and make music, [and] that’s when I really caught on to it. Ever since then, that’s where I want my career to reside. If I do go back to school, it will be for business and marketing for a music career.”
ALEXIS LLOYD
Outreach Coordinator
Alexis Lloyd thought she wanted to be an athletic trainer, but after enrolling at Tallahassee Community College, she realized “that
was not something I wanted to wake up and do every day.” So the 26-year-old Mount Vernon native came back to New York in 2019 and began taking certificate courses with Soulful Synergy.
She ended up earning five in all, in such areas as OSHA compliance, security, and fire safety. “I love learning new things, and these were for free, so why not?” she says.
With no particular career in mind, she took a job as an assistant project manager at Murphy Brothers Construction, a partner with Soul Synergy. Murphy Brothers was looking for an entry-level worker who was “ready to learn,” she says. And she was. “I loved it. I had never thought how construction plays into everyday life.”
But the COVID-19 pandemic forced the company to downsize, and she was laid off in 2021. She found some part- time work for a few months, until another Soulful Synergy partner, the Guidance Center of Westchester, hired her as an outreach coordinator in February 2022. In her current position, she goes into local businesses and residential housing
units to promote its programs. “I am an alum, so I know the opportunities that are out there. You just have to be willing to want it,” she says.
She hopes to take classes at FIT some day and become a designer, but “helping my community is my main focus now.” For others struggling to decide what to do with their lives, “my advice is to go with your gut. You should wake up and love whatever you are doing. It comes from within.”
“We need common core classes. At the same time, you need to know you’re going into the workforce. College can teach broad aspects of a field, but [my
training program] got into the nitty-gritty of it.”
—Stacy Yonnone
44 2022 SKILLS What’s Hot. What’s Next. What’s Needed.
© Courtesy of Alexis Lloyd